Joseph Columbo started the “Italian-American Civil Rights League” as a means to have the public at large provide respectability, and cover for crimes by his organized criminal families.
The membership at peak reached 100,000.
Nonetheless Columbo was gunned down in public by a competing crime family member at a League event.
Law Enforcement stayed focused on the criminal familes.
I think it is naïve for non-criminal biker groups to voluntarily associate and therefore provide cover, respectability to the criiminals.
Bandidos = criminal
Cossacks = criminal
Guess what? That was KNOWN before the confab, which police discouraged the restaurant owner from hosting.
IOW law enforcement tried to avoid trouble. They next came to observe the event, for they continued to expect that there MIGHT be trouble.
When they came for the Mafia, the other Italian Americans said “take them, all of them, they are not us.”
The good biker groups should likewise say “take the criminals. Take them all. They are not us.”
But apparently the good guys are so intimidated, they seemingly feel compelled to give the outlaws credibility, respectability and cover.
What if they........stood up to the criminals?
But, no articles like this suggest the cops are wrong, when it is the criminals that are wrong.
Columbo flourished in a day of higher public servant accountability. High on the list of FBI thou shalt nots were Thou Shalt Not Embarrass The Bureau. If you did, you were gone — no police union folderol, no huge investigation.
The reason the Trayvons and the Browns of the world get the anti hero statuses they do, even in the face of obvious documentation, is not entirely arisen in a vacuum.
There is a greater right and wrong beyond our fallible civil institutions, and it insists on making itself known even at the cost of travesty.
We also tend to expect more out of those with “licence to kill.”
Just observe... not if they knew that Bandidos were about to double cross Cossacks. It would not be a matter of whether the trouble, just when and how. The technically legally defensible thing to do was not the ethical thing.